miss jinxed:Hippies are idiots who ruined the "green" "environmentally friendly" stuff for everyone. Imagine if it had been a Nixon republican spouting all the save the planet crap. There'd be wind farms on every corner.

miss jinxed:Hippies are idiots who ruined the "green" "environmentally friendly" stuff for everyone. Imagine if it had been a Nixon republican spouting all the save the planet crap. There'd be wind farms on every corner.

So, the only evil people are hippies?

As someone who was young back then, all environmentalists weren't hippies nor were all hippies environmentalists.

fluffy2097:pstudent12: Most western "buddhists" don't even know the name of Buddha

Which Buddha? Buddha is a state of being, not a specific person. One of them is Siddhartha, who you usually see in India. China has the fat jolly laughing buddha who's belly you rub for good luck. I forget his name.

bdub77:There's no question the EPA has helped the environment and cap and trade might be effective as a policy but water pollution remains a big problem.

Well, power generation, plus the reduction of ferrous ores is literally done by layering the ore with coke and burning the coke layers.

Like I said, though, CO2's a new issue that's not really on a scale the EPA can realistically manage even at full power, beyond creating white paper on the subject to advise people doing the international treaties. One could actually argue pretty convincingly that the reason CO2 is an issue, also, is that the EPA has solved most of our more urgent air-quality issues.

As to the bit I quoted... yeah. Pollution's still an issue, and will always be an issue. Thus the rage over the funding cuts. Water's a tough nut to crack, we've had some luck with the cap-and-trade model but there are a lot more different chemicals to deal with and time-variant water levels interact with acceptable concentrations in the obvious way, making it kind of a nightmare to make coherent guidelines a lot of places.

// Actually the big "why didn't we think of that 50 years ago" solution for steel's contribution to water pollution was somebody going "hey, wait a minute, isn't part of slag a cementitious binder?" ... and now a huge chunk of US cement is cut with (or almost entirely) fly ash, turning what used to be waste dumped in the river into a reasonably profitable secondary product. And the remainder of the slag is less volatile and easier to dispose of. Not really problem solved but it was a huge step.

yakmans_dad:miss jinxed: Hippies are idiots who ruined the "green" "environmentally friendly" stuff for everyone. Imagine if it had been a Nixon republican spouting all the save the planet crap. There'd be wind farms on every corner.

So, the only evil people are hippies?

As someone who was young back then, all environmentalists weren't hippies nor were all hippies environmentalists.

/There are, what, around 100 hippies still in existence?

Bring this guy back. He appealed to the hippies, squares, straights and queers.

theflatline:yakmans_dad: miss jinxed: Hippies are idiots who ruined the "green" "environmentally friendly" stuff for everyone. Imagine if it had been a Nixon republican spouting all the save the planet crap. There'd be wind farms on every corner.

So, the only evil people are hippies?

As someone who was young back then, all environmentalists weren't hippies nor were all hippies environmentalists.

/There are, what, around 100 hippies still in existence?

Bring this guy back. He appealed to the hippies, squares, straights and queers.

Unobtanium:theflatline: yakmans_dad: miss jinxed: Hippies are idiots who ruined the "green" "environmentally friendly" stuff for everyone. Imagine if it had been a Nixon republican spouting all the save the planet crap. There'd be wind farms on every corner.

So, the only evil people are hippies?

As someone who was young back then, all environmentalists weren't hippies nor were all hippies environmentalists.

/There are, what, around 100 hippies still in existence?

Bring this guy back. He appealed to the hippies, squares, straights and queers.

jaytkay:miss jinxed: Hippies are idiots who ruined the "green" "environmentally friendly" stuff for everyone. Imagine if it had been a Nixon republican spouting all the save the planet crap. There'd be wind farms on every corner.

The EPA was proposed by President Richard Nixon and began operation onDecember 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order[pdxretro.com image 474x474]

Nixon also tried to get universal health care, but the Democrats rejected it. Not because they didn't agree, but because they would rather the poor suffer than a Republican get credit.

Jim_Callahan:I'd disagree with the moving things to china bit, honestly. The industries we sank were mostly steel and machining, the industries that are the big polluters are paper, shipping, and power generation, all of which are still mostly domestic. There are some things that we pass to other countries that are big polluters, like Aluminium mining and rare-earth refining, but that's more because there aren't raw materials for those things domestically than anything else.

Siddhartha Gautama may or may not have existed, the works written about him are entirely hagiographic, and his name translates to "He who achieves his aim." Not saying it's definitely fiction, but...

Buddhism has long been the tool of merchants and the rich for Millennia, that's why it was one of the principal religions of Silk Road Merchants, and Japanese Buddhist temples were essentially tax-havens built by and for the super-rich. (Humanity NEVER changes) Entering the priesthood was a political move in Japan, not a pious one, and tourism in the Edo period was always under the pretext of Temple pilgrimage.

Zen Buddhism was primarily instituted to keep the Samurai in line, and not upset the status quo of the shogunate. It was later co-opted by the Empire of Japan to provide legitimacy to Japanese imperialism, and to provide a rationale for the brutal methods Japanese soldiers would employ, which can be summed up best in the phrase "The sword that gives life." i.e. "It's okay to kill them, because Wheel of Life!"

In my humble opinion, whoever wrote this article is the most naive motherfarker in history.

This is something that has been going on since the 60s. Essentially, the issue is that American Buddhism really looks nothing like Asian Buddhism. American Buddhism is more of a New Age Syncretic religion that uses basic Buddhist ideas and then adds a lot of stuff on top of it while taking away a lot of the stuff that they don't like. Essentially, American Buddhism is a Burger King religion (My way, right away.) This has caused a lot of Asian Buddhists a great deal of grief because they feel their religion has essentially been coopted by people who don't really understand it or practice it in any way resembling how they practice it. Homosexuality is one of the big hang-ups. There are very few traditional Buddhists that would tell you that it is morally OK (even the Dalai Lama was very much against it before cultural headwinds in the West caused him to change his mind.) There are very few American Buddhists that would condemn it. American Buddhists are very frequently atheistic in their practice of Buddhism and you'll even hear them say that Buddhism has no gods. This would come as a shock to most traditional Buddhists that have a very rich and elaborate pantheon. There are also issues with practice, the rituals that American Buddhists use tend to be very distorted through a Western lens. Traditional Buddhism is much more communal and religious in tone while American Buddhism tends to focus on the individual. They also tend to not communicate at all. American Buddhists are put off by many traditional Buddhist practices and Asian Buddhists frequently see American Buddhists as little more than poseurs or crazy Americans. There are actually quite a few scholarly papers on the phenomenon that are interesting reads.

senoy:This is something that has been going on since the 60s. Essentially, the issue is that American Buddhism really looks nothing like Asian Buddhism. American Buddhism is more of a New Age Syncretic religion that uses basic Buddhist ideas and then adds a lot of stuff on top of it while taking away a lot of the stuff that they don't like. Essentially, American Buddhism is a Burger King religion (My way, right away.) This has caused a lot of Asian Buddhists a great deal of grief because they feel their religion has essentially been coopted by people who don't really understand it or practice it in any way resembling how they practice it. Homosexuality is one of the big hang-ups. There are very few traditional Buddhists that would tell you that it is morally OK (even the Dalai Lama was very much against it before cultural headwinds in the West caused him to change his mind.) There are very few American Buddhists that would condemn it. American Buddhists are very frequently atheistic in their practice of Buddhism and you'll even hear them say that Buddhism has no gods. This would come as a shock to most traditional Buddhists that have a very rich and elaborate pantheon. There are also issues with practice, the rituals that American Buddhists use tend to be very distorted through a Western lens. Traditional Buddhism is much more communal and religious in tone while American Buddhism tends to focus on the individual. They also tend to not communicate at all. American Buddhists are put off by many traditional Buddhist practices and Asian Buddhists frequently see American Buddhists as little more than poseurs or crazy Americans. There are actually quite a few scholarly papers on the phenomenon that are interesting reads.

That's an awfully broad brush. I'm not as familiar with other forms, but Indo-Tibetan Buddhism is largely atheistic - the deities are no more real than any other projection of mind. Granted, the lay people who traditionally practiced it in the East might not have realized that, but that's the way it is. Of course, there were and are a lot of Eastern and Western practitioners who meditate simply because of the culture of it or it makes them feel better or whatever, without understanding the philosophy of it. It's just like any religion, or any other human endeavor for that matter. There are a lot of people who go through the motions and a few that actually understand whatever it is that they're doing. As far as homosexuality, that is more of a cultural thing. There's nothing that I know of that explicitly says homosexual conduct is unacceptable unless you are a monastic, in which case any sexual activity is a violation of vows.

My guess is that you're viewing things from a Western worldview. I doubt many Tibetan Buddhists would agree with your assessment and it also exemplifies the problem. The fact that you posit something that is against what traditional Buddhist practitioners would say their religion is about and then proceed to tell them they simply didn't realize that they were wrong and don't understand their own philosophy is pretty much the essential thing that causes the rift.

Imagine if you will that you are a practicing 'Xist' and your family has been a practicing 'Xist' for the last 1000 years and you were raised as an 'Xist' and you do all of the things that every other 'Xist' you know has done and believe the things that every other 'Xist' believes since as long as your grandmother's grandmother remembers. One day, you meet someone that says they are an 'Xist' from a different country and they learned about their 'Xism' from some other person in their country that read a book and spent one summer during college at a religious retreat in your country and they politely inform you that what you're doing is incorrect and that you fail to understand 'Xism' and you simply are ignorant of true 'Xist' beliefs that they are privileged to know via their reading and their religious leader. You would be offended at best and likely feel that they are full of all manner of fecal matter. That pretty much sums up what many Asian Buddhists feel about their Western counterparts.

senoy:My guess is that you're viewing things from a Western worldview. I doubt many Tibetan Buddhists would agree with your assessment and it also exemplifies the problem. The fact that you posit something that is against what traditional lay Buddhist practitioners would say their religion is about and then proceed to tell them they simply didn't realize that they were wrong and don't understand their own philosophy is pretty much the essential thing that causes the rift.

Imagine if you will that you are a practicing 'Xist' and your family has been a practicing 'Xist' for the last 1000 years and you were raised as an 'Xist' and you do all of the things that every other 'Xist' you know has done and believe the things that every other 'Xist' believes since as long as your grandmother's grandmother remembers. One day, you meet someone that says they are an 'Xist' from a different country and they learned about their 'Xism' from some other person in their country that read a book and spent one summer during college at a religious retreat in your country and they politely inform you that what you're doing is incorrect and that you fail to understand 'Xism' and you simply are ignorant of true 'Xist' beliefs that they are privileged to know via their reading and their religious leader. You would be offended at best and likely feel that they are full of all manner of fecal matter. That pretty much sums up what many Asian Buddhists feel about their Western counterparts.

FTFYI'm actually friends with a monk from Bhutan. He says a lot of the Easterners are lazy and don't practice or study in contrast to Western Buddhists. For them, it's like Christians who go to church on Christmas and Easter. There is a rift, but I don't see why that's a problem. I'm also not sure why you assume to know how I'm looking at the situation. Are you a Buddhist practitioner?